MZ FLASHBACKS — Part 1: How to manage your Hockey team

by damo11

Remember back in the day when there were screens like that? I’m talking 2003 here when a few of us first started playing MZ. Yes, we feel like fossils, but that’s what the theme is here for MZ Flashbacks. What we do is regurgitate content that you may have forgotten, sometimes relevant, sometimes effective in today’s game. Other times it’s just interesting to see where the game has gone.

In saying that, this article below is from Zone 222 with a guide on How to manage your Hockey team (part one).

That’s enough from me, so enjoy the nostalgia that comes with the read!

Agapitod – Ice Hockey – Training U18 (Winger)

Giving continuation to our training series, we’ve changed our attentions to wingers this time so you can see how some of the best managers at developing youths in the game do!!!

Not surprisingly, most of these managers that helped us with this article have lifted important trophies in the past season, so if you plan on reaching high stages in Official Cups we suggest you to read it carefully!

The Experiment
The same format was used for this article, so we gave the managers a fictitious player with 15 pucks and asked them to show us how they’d train him. Here he is!
The idea is to leave the managers’ mind free as a bird and just think about the best train for this youth, without concerning about maxes. Some training plans showed here are very good and we wish it could be always like this, but real life is a bit bitter and we frequently bump into early maximizations as you will see further down. But for now, have a look at the wingers made especially for TZI. Not bad huh?

Power was obviously highly trained, surely because it’s a common sense that the young boys need to reach a minimum amount in this attribute before they graduate (and looking at them, the minimum seems to be 8) but Stamina was also well trained, almost as much as Shooting which shows again the importance of this skill nowadays.
The average of pucks gained per season by a player ranges from 5.33 to 8 but 6.33 is the goal of most of them which is totally possible nowadays. What is the average of your players? Do you know?

Training Camp
The packages available in the game don’t help a lot the development of wingers. For instance, we can’t find a package with Shooting and Stamina which would give them a great boost in their years as amateur. We also don’t find a package with only Power and Shooting, for this reason, most of the managers have chosen to train the attribute which defines a winger outside the TC!
The package Forward N. 5 (Stamina, Quickness, Power) was the most chosen but the Forward N.3 which contains checking alongside power and shooting was used a couple of times as well.
It’s important to remind that in this article, the managers could choose whichever package they want in order to fulfil their ideal plans, therefore the real trainings may follow a different course depending on the TC you have available at the time and if you don’t have TC exchanges.

Comparison with real Youths
Even though we have a plan and it will make your player look good after the first three terms, there are always trammels in our route which deprive some young boys to become a legend (or even to be useful for the Uxx teams).
Trammels like early maximization and also the impossibility to choose the best TC for them as explained above are the main reason for an unsuccessful plan and delay in their development. So we asked the head bosses to show if they have some players who were trained close to the way they consider ideal, and looking at the real players we can clearly see the delay in some players’ evolution or in case of Breffni McCready, the early max we talked about that changed the manager’s plan for him.

Early maxes and slow trainers do not mean the player will become useless and Marquinhos Guimaraes and Breffni McCready are the best examples to believe that! But they won’t evolve if you don’t do the right thing! Have a look at them now.

Considerations
It was already stated in this article but it’s important to highlight that we can’t always send the youth to the TC we want, especially when training wingers, therefore they will take more time to have the image you expected of him. Maybe that’s why this position is so highly valued in the market!
The examples of the two players above is more than a proof that early maxes or slow training players can become something good if you have patience. This word by the way is the key to succeed in a managerial game like MZ.
To sum up, wingers are harder than defenders to train, but you need them don’t you? So don’t give up on them, plan a train, re-plan every time he maxes if it’s needed but keep training, no matter what. TC and good coaches are indispensable!

Results
Two thirds of the series is out and you can have an idea whether is easy or not to follow the plans showed by the managers. Is it easy? Well, it’s not but nothing is easy in the game and if it was, we don’t think MZ would have been as fun and addictive as it is!
Anyway there is one more articles to come (about keepers), so let’s wait a bit and give our verdicts in the end!

Agapitod – Ice Hockey – Training U18 (Defender)

Some time ago, we’ve made some articles showing how to train a youth. It was about a real player trained by a real manager and not just a theory made by them.

Well, now it’s time to go back to theories of youth trainings and compare with reality, so we’ve gathered data from Top managers, famous for developing strong youths and who are doing really well in U18 Competitions. The intention of this article is only to show you different ways to train youths and also see whether these training plans are easy or hard to apply. Perhaps you can follow one of these. We felt it wasn’t necessary to name who trained who so there wouldn’t exist any comparison between the managers’ plans.

The Experiment
We gave them a sample of a youth with 15 pucks and asked the managers how they’d train him as a defender!!!
We didn’t think about maxes as we wanted to see their ideal trainings and how the players should be after 3 seasons, and then compare with their real youths to see whether it’s easy, hard or close to impossible to train them as it is intended.

As you could see, because of the new sim, Stamina is as important as Power now and everyone gave this attribute a special attention! Quickness and Skating were quite well trained in the first 3 seasons as well.
The average of pucks gained between the six samples was 6.99 but there were some differences between trainings with minimum of 4.66 pucks per season and 10.33! Which one of them is closer to the way you train your youth?

Training Camp
Training Camp for developing youths is a ‘must’ apparently as all the lads told us they’d send them to TC in the three seasons. In this case, for defenders, the Central Package number 8 (Checking, Power, Stamina) and Defender Package number 12 (Checking, Power) were the ones most used. So when you plan on training good defenders, have a look if they are available!!!
Of course the packages you want are not always available and it makes us change our plan sometimes but one more time, the intention of this article is to show some of the top managers’ trainings and for that, they could choose any package they wanted (as if they were using Training Camp Exchanges).

Comparison with real Youths
We all have in mind an ideal way to train our young boys in order them to reach their maximum as quick as possible. The problem is that their maximum sometimes comes earlier than we think and they come from pearls to rubbish in a day. For instance, the average of pucks gained per season is 6.25 but the minimum gained is 4 while the maximum 11. Sometimes the quickest trainers are the first to max, on the other hand slower boys need patient managers which is not always easy to find!
So we asked the head bosses to show if they have some players who were trained close to the way they consider ideal and some of them do indeed look like the ones they showed in the experiment, while others weren’t quite close. Have a look and give your verdict whether they are similar or not so much.

Some of the managers have also showed us how they became a couple of other seasons after they were formed in the youth academy. The result of one in special is quite impressive, meaning that you have to keep training hard your boys, even after becoming professional!!!

Considerations
It was already stated in this article but it’s important to highlight that we can’t always send the youth to the TC we want due to have different packages every week and only 6 exchanges TC per season. For that reason, the youth can have a different image than you thought after three seasons, but if he’s worth to keep investing, please do so! Maximizations are another reason to change our plans and as you could see in the real youths, only 1 out of 5 athletes didn’t have any maxes with 18 years old. Anyway, plan is essential in order to succeed in the game and patience, a lot of patience!! This is a managerial game which requires plans (short, medium and long term) and patience to follow you own plans.

Results
As this is a series with 3 articles in total, we obviously won’t give the result of our experience now, only in the end, so stay tuned and wait for the upcoming ones that will be about wingers and keepers. Don’t miss out!!!

Agapitod – Ice Hockey – Training U18 (Keeper)

This is the last article of the series ‘Training Youths’ and if the previous ones were about defenders and wingers, now we will obviously present trainings for keepers!

This position as you may know is the hardest one to be trained so we kept our plan to gather data from great managers, specialists in developing goalies. Do you wonder how do they do it? There we go…
The Experiment
If you read the previous articles, you know exactly how we do the experiment. A fictitious youth with 15 pucks like the picture beside is given to the manager, and then the head bosses make their plans, tell us minutely how they’d do and show the result they expect after three seasons.
As nobody plans to have early maxes, we ruled this out of our experiment so we can have an exact idea of how good keepers should be when they graduate. Looking at the pics below, they look all very promising and not too far from being ready to play in the senior team, but can this happen? Are some of these trainings possible at your training ground?

For keepers, you don’t need to train a lot of attributes as the other players, but you have to reach the maximum in the important ones, so three skills were massively trained before 18 years old. Play Intelligence is also really important, though it hasn’t been trained in the first seasons as it takes too much time to gain a puck.
Because of only few attributes are important at this stage, the keepers look similar to one another and in special, the number two and four look identical!
Training Camp
There are only 3 different camps to train keeper and obviously they were chosen to develop them. The Wild Card Package number 6 (Stamina, Keeping, Quickness) was vastly used by the managers while the number 7 (Stamina, Passing, Keeping) was used by only 1 user.
The difference here is that not all the managers chose to send them to TC in all seasons. The identical keepers II and IV were send to TC 3 times while the others only 2 or 1. The managers who trained keeper I and III sent them only in the last season, when they got a good amount of keeping while the opposite applied to keeper V as he attended the TC in the first and second season as youth.
It’s hard to see training camps for keepers available and for this reason, the managers need to use the TC exchanges and that’s a difference between these ideal keepers and real life ones. One manager in particular has told us that he doesn’t use exchanges TC to keepers, therefore his plan is not usually applied!
Comparison with real Youths
This position is definitely the one with the biggest difference between plan and execution! For instance, apart from keeper I who was planned to reach 8 in keeping before becoming professional, all the others were intended to reach at least 9 in the same attribute, but when we asked to show real players, we couldn’t quite see a lot of similarities. It was quite the contrary as you can see in the pic below…

Farid Mami and Manuel Neuer were the closest (but not quite close) if compare to keeper III and IV when they had 18 years old, but it gets even worse after graduation because Manuel Neuer had the ‘so hated’ early maximization and won’t be useful anymore, therefore only Farid Mami has reached the maximum amount in the main attribute and became a good guardian (terrific guardian by the way).

Results
We had an article about each position now and you can have your verdict right now. Training ideal players is not at all easy and as a matter of fact, we rarely see them in the game, but that’s what makes the managerzone so fun, it’s the difficulty, the challenges offered, the success and failure. Talking about failure, we can say that you are always close to failure when training keepers as in this article you saw that less than 20% of them become a useful one, but when you succeed, it’s like finding a diamond! You’re rich!